Beginning Flash®, Flex®, and AIR® Development for Mobile Devices

4

Touch, Multitouch, and Gestures

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Determining mobile device support for touch points and gesture input
• Setting the input mode in an application to detect touch points or gestures
• Understanding touch and gesture event object types
• Handling touch and gesture events
• Utilizing touch input to draw shapes
• Implementing gestures to interact with shapes
• Using the Multitouch panel in Device Central

Many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) now opt for user interfaces on their devices that are designed specifically for touch screens, which gives end users a visual display of information. In addition, these give users the whole area of the display to contact and navigate around various screens within the OS and applications. Usually this is with a finger, or an accompanying device accessory such as a stylus.

The alternative to the touch screen of course is the more traditional mobile device, which provides the visual display but without touch support. These mobile devices tend to receive end-user input through a combination of trackball, 4-way D-pad, soft keys, qwerty keyboard, and alphanumeric keypads.

Mobile devices with touch screen interfaces have been at their height of popularity since the introduction of the first iPhone, which had a capacitive touch screen implementation, meaning even the most sensitive of touches will be recognized by a user. The success of the iPhone, in part, can be attributed to the integration of multitouch and gesture ...